This is cool – Visual Studio Live! is coming to Washington D.C. this October.

This is the first time the conference has been in D.C. and I’m personally quite excited – not only by the chance to talk to a bunch of enthusiastic technologists from all over the world, but also because I’ll be in D.C. and can take a little time to see some of the monuments and museums.

What a great opportunity!

You can save $400 off the 5 day all-access Best Value Conference Package by registering here with priority code DCSPK17.

As per my previous post, I’ll also be speaking in Redmond this summer. So whether you attend in the summer on the west coast, or the fall on the east coast I look forward to seeing you!

I thought you might be interested to know that I’ll be speaking at Visual Studio Live!, August 18-22 in Redmond, WA http://bit.ly/RDSPK18 . Join us on this special journey to explore topics covering all-things WCF, ALM, Web Development, Data Management, Visual Studio and more!

I’ll be presenting the following sessions:

Leveraging Windows Azure websites What’s new in WinRT Development

SPECIAL OFFER: As a speaker, I can extend $500 savings on the 5-day package. Register here: http://bit.ly/RDSPK18Reg_ and use code RDSPK18

Learn how you can build better applications at Visual Studio Live! Redmond — bring the development issues that keep you up at night and prepare to leave this event with the answers, guidance and training you need. Register now: http://bit.ly/RDSPK18Reg_

I just had an odd thing happen – the Windows Store app (the store itself) crashed and wouldn’t start, even after a reboot. I’d click the tile and the app would show its launch screen with the busy animation. Task manager showed that it was consuming around half my total CPU time.

I found lots of different possible solutions by searching. From the comments it sounds like some of them fix the issue for some people. None of them (even some wacky ones like enabling Hyper-V) worked for me.

The primary solution appears to be running the Apps troubleshooter. And this did find an issue with the store and it reset the store cache (or tried anyway).

I think (though I’m not sure) that this is the same as running the wsreset.exe utility that is supposed to reset the store’s cache and launch the store.

Neither of those solutions worked.

So I thought if the cache was the problem perhaps I should just clear the cache myself. The cache for the store is located at

We are having this interesting discussion on yammer in Magenic about tech companies and how they compete in the current rapidly changing landscape. Here’s my response to a question about Microsoft’s competitive strategy in a world of Modern App development:

I think we're seeing a number of clear strategies from Microsoft.

1. Release key apps for every major platform - Office for iPad, Skype, Lync are examples - so users get the Microsoft apps they rely on even if they aren't on a Microsoft device – there’s a truism that people don’t buy computers or operating systems (or devices) – they buy machines that run useful apps – software is king, and Microsoft has some of the best software out there

2. Create the most compelling cloud services offering to users - outlook.com, OneDrive, etc. Notice that there are first-class OneDrive and OneNote apps for OS X and iOS for example. As someone who leverages all these cloud services, I find them to be extremely compelling – much in the same way Office is compelling – because they all play so well together as a unified family

3. Create a new device segment via Surface, where users get the productivity of a laptop with the pleasurable leisure experience of a tablet - for my part the Surface is _exactly_ what I've always wanted, because it is my dev machine _and_ I can watch movies on the plane even if the person in front of me reclines their seat

4. Create a comprehensive cross-platform tooling strategy - by partnering with Xamarin (and now with Cordova support) and building out their JavaScript/TypeScript capabilities Microsoft is making it pretty darned easy to build .NET or js apps in Visual Studio that target every platform. This is to their benefit because there are still more Windows devices on the planet than any thing else (if you count all the desktops/laptops that run virtually every enterprise out there) and if they can keep us all building the same software for Windows as everything else then (even in the worst case) inertia works in their favor

5. Leveraging their patent portfolio - like 'em or hate 'em, patents are a real thing, and Microsoft makes around $8-$10 per Android device and I believe some off each iDevice too - and now they are giving Windows away for free for devices under 7" 9”, so Windows is now the cheapest mainstream phone OS on the planet

6. Create the most comprehensive PaaS offering for cloud development - notice that Azure is not only amazingly compelling for .NET developers, but also for HTML 5/Java/PHP/etc. Even if they were to entirely lose the client they have a good shot at being the dominant, or certainly one of the dominant, cloud and server development targets in the foreseeable future

As well all know, portable class libraries are pretty cool, but are restricted by the “lowest common denominator” effect.

For example, CSLA .NET supports the use of DataAnnotations along with the richer CSLA rules engine.

In trying to create one of the new “Universal PCL” assemblies to support WinRT on Win8 and WP8 I ran into the fact that WP8 doesn’t support DataAnnotations.

“No problem” I thought, “we already have our own implementation for WP8 Silverlight, for Android, and for iOS. I’ll just use that code.”

Which worked insofar as that I have a Universal PCL Csla.dll that builds.

But it doesn’t work because I can’t actually use that Csla.dll from WinRT on Win8 because that WinRT already has DataAnnotations and so there are type collisions.

As a result it isn’t clear to me that I can actually create a Universal PCL for CSLA – at least not one that supports DataAnnotations across all platforms like I’m able to do if I create one assembly per target platform (like I’ve been doing since 2007 with Silverlight 2).

I guess this makes sense. The guidance around creating a PCL is that you have code that is simple enough that it doesn’t include any platform-specific implementations that would be solved easily using #if directives. The internal implementation of some parts of CSLA is far from simple, and we do use #if directives to optimize for and/or leverage features of each of the 9 platforms currently supported by CSLA (yes, we really provide business code portability across NINE different platforms).

My personal feeling is that I’d rather support all 9 platforms as efficiently as possible, rather than compromise one or more of them just to use a fancy and optional new concept like the Universal PCL.

(of course if Microsoft and Xamarin add DataAnnotations to Windows Phone 8.1, Android, and iOS then I wouldn’t need to implement it in CSLA and that would also solve this problem – so maybe someday :) )

That might be ok, though I’ve long since adapted to the start screen so I’m not sure I care at all.

What I do care about are much more real challenges when working in the ‘modern’ or WinRT (Windows Runtime or Windows Store) side of the operating system.

My top list:

The file save/open dialogs don’t sort or filter items and so are almost useless if you have a lot of files

The file save/open dialogs (and OneNote app) often don’t show the full filename or properties of files, making similar files hard to distinguish – again making these core aspects of the OS extremely challenging if not useless

The OneDrive app doesn’t let me access folders shared to me by other people – a feature I use constantly, and so spend more time in the web UI than the app

Unpredictability and lack of control about how WinRT apps display side-by-side is a continual thorn in my side – I launch an app in one monitor and it messes up the display in another monitor? Seriously?!?!

The Calendar app is lame at best. It has some good features, but wastes amazing amounts of space and lacks simple bits of functionality like copying an item or moving an item from one calendar to another. Hopefully it turns into something more like the Windows Phone 8.1 calendar

There’s no way to schedule Lync meetings using the Lync app – how lame is that???

I’ve tried nearly all the file manager apps out there, and some are not bad, but what I _don’t_ understand is why the OneDrive app (which already does OneDrive and local PC stuff) doesn’t just handle things like removable and network drives so it would literally be the “one drive” app

I want a notification summary screen like we now have in Windows Phone 8.1 - _that_ is a useful feature!

I guess what I’m getting at is that I understand that Microsoft feels like they need to add back the Start menu to lure stubborn people into using Win8. BUT what I’m afraid will happen is that they’ll lure people into the WinRT world only to have those people suffer the same day-to-day frustrations I already suffer because these core fit-and-finish capabilities aren’t implemented or complete.

Personally I think it would be better to make the WinRT platform so nice and compelling and fun to use that people will _choose_ to use it over the legacy Desktop with or without cosmetic stuff like a Start menu.

The term “modern app” is starting to gain some traction in our industry, but what is a modern app?

Microsoft started using this term to describe formerly-Metro and now Windows Store apps, but then they kind of backed off because they settled on Windows Store App as the name for what they were doing.

At Magenic though, we design and build modern apps for our customers in a platform independent way. We define the term thusly:

Modern applications support all types of devices, from phones to tablets to laptops to desktop computers, on all different platforms, from Windows to iOS to Android and HTML5. They provide first-class support for touch, keyboard, and mouse scenarios. And they rely on well-considered UX design to enable your users to leverage complex back-end or cloud-based services and data in a highly productive and compelling manner.

In our view, modern applications extend beyond simple mobile apps to include enterprise realities such as the need to work on existing computing devices (mostly PCs with keyboards and mice) as well as newer devices such as ultrabooks, tablets, and phones of all shapes, sizes, and OSes. And modern apps leverage existing backend services, as well as public and/or private cloud infrastructure where appropriate.

You can imagine that this definition of modern apps isn’t necessarily neat or simple, but it is meaningful. A typical modern app requires extensive development an integration on an enterprise’s servers and backend systems. It probably has a substantial Windows or web client for use by employees who need deep and rich interactivity with the entire system. And in today’s world it almost certainly has a meaningful subset of (or even full) functionality on tablets and phones.

At the moment enterprises are still trying to make BYOD work. As a result a typical modern app tends to have multiple client device implementations. If the BYOD trend continues it is reasonable to expect that cross-platform technologies such as Xamarin and JavaScript will become the norm rather than multiple disparate native implementations.

It is also possible that the high cost of BYOD for enterprise apps will cause enterprises to reassert control over client devices (like what happened 20 years ago as the PC and Windows emerged into the enterprise). This would likely bring out one majority client platform such as the Windows Runtime (WinRT) that enterprises would target for many internal modern business apps.

Time will tell on that front. But regardless, the high emphasis on UX, the need to support keyboard/mouse and touch equally, and the deep integration with existing enterprise and cloud systems are the cornerstones of the definition of a modern app.

Visual Studio Live! is coming to Chicago again this year. We’re right downtown near the big park and the lake, so it is a great location!

Even better, we’ve got a great lineup of content that covers today’s technologies (like WPF and ASP.NET) and emerging technologies like JavaScript single page applications (SPAs), TypeScript, mobile development for Android, iOS, and Windows.

I hope to see you there!

Update: I forgot to mention that you can save $400 on registration by clicking the link in this post!